Affirmative Action: Part 2
Hi Friends,
Welcome to Issue 57 of this newsletter. This week’s topic is: Affirmative Action, following up after our first newsletter on the topic. If you haven’t read that newsletter yet, I highly recommend it. In that newsletter we discussed the history and background of affirmative action. Today, we’ll discuss the impact and implications of affirmative action and the most recent Supreme Court decision. Personally, I benefited from affirmative action as an undergrad at NYU. As a Black, Hispanic, first-generation women, I am part of several underrepresented and marginalized communities. Socio-economically, I grew up understanding I would need a scholarship to be able to pursue higher education. My high school was ranked among the bottom 50% of public schools in New Jersey with only 43% of students achieving reading proficiency. As an adult, I am blown away when my peers talk about internships, fellowships, summer programs and organizations that they participated in while in high school because I never had the opportunity to participate in any of them. I thought being drama club president and on every single club (multicultural club, key club, national honor society) meant that I was doing the absolute maximum in school participation. The issue was — I didn’t know what I didn’t know. I did not understand that there were so many opportunities I was missing out on because I had never heard of them. Because of the systemic disadvantage that I faced having immigrant parents and attending a low ranking public school, I am so grateful that NYU took a holistic approach to my application, understanding the levels of disadvantages I had while also appreciating the ways in which I succeeded with the opportunities I was given. I had a great essay. I scored a perfect score on the language and writing sections of the SATs. I was in the top 5% of my graduating class. I took and passed 4 AP exams. I was the National Honor Society vice president. I worked hard. I just didn’t see all of the ways that my particular corner of the world lacked the access to a lot of things that could have made me even better. This is a conversation close to my heart. Let’s get into it.
Lets Get Into It
Successes of Affirmative Action
Affirmative action reduces discrimination in education and employment settings
Students who benefit from affirmative action are more likely to graduate college and to earn professional degrees, and have higher incomes. So affirmative action acts as an engine for social mobility for its direct beneficiaries. This in turn leads to a more diverse leadership, which you can see steadily growing in the United States
Affirmative action has helped increase the percentage of Black Americans in medical school by a factor of four
Affirmative action can improve police-community relations. Police departments throughout many states used affirmative action planning to determine any problem areas with respect to minority representation among their workforce. Subsequently, those departments have increased their complement of officers from racial minority groups. A study of the fifty largest cities in the United States had shown that from 1983 to 1992, police departments, using AAP, “made progress in the employment of African-American and Hispanic officers.”
Affirmative action forbids employers to discriminate against individuals because of their race, color, religion, sex, or national origin
The Supreme Court Ruling
Ultimately, the most recent Supreme Court ruling was against the use of affirmative action — saying in the majority opinion written by Chief Justice John Roberts that the systems in place "lack sufficiently focused and measurable objectives warranting the use of race, unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping, and lack meaningful end points, those admissions programs cannot be reconciled with the guarantees of the Equal Protection Clause.” But the court did not rule out race entirely in admission programs, adding, "nothing prohibits universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected the applicant’s life, so long as that discussion is concretely tied to a quality of character or unique ability that the particular applicant can contribute to the university."
Some important points to note are:
While the ruling focuses specifically on barring race as a factor in admissions, it doesn't limit institutions' outreach, engagement, retention or completion strategies aimed at enrolling diverse student bodies. Higher education scholars and counselors say the onus is on colleges and universities to ensure that their applicant pools include students of color — many of whom come from segregated school districts with fewer resources (like me!)
Higher education institutions will be able to continue to “promote diversity based on background, based on socioeconomic experiences,” among other experiences. A wide array of experiences can still define what it means to have a diverse student body — including students' experiences, where they grew up and their areas of interest.
Banning affirmative action on a state-level is not new. It is staggering, however, to be experiencing this on a national level. State-level bans on using race-based affirmative action in Arizona, California, Florida, Idaho, Michigan, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Oklahoma and Washington have already given the country a glimpse of the consequences of prohibiting such a practice. Research shows that in those nine states, the enrollment of students from underrepresented communities declined, even if other factors, such as class, were weighed more heavily.
What's important to note, experts say, is that race was just one factor used to determine admissions at some selective colleges and universities — along with students' academic records, extracurricular activities, essays, recommendations and standardized test scores for some schools. No university has ever used race alone to admit a student.
The new ruling says a college or university can’t use race as a factor in determining whether a student should be admitted. But students can still convey their racial or ethnic backgrounds through extracurricular activities and other application materials, such as essays and personal statements. HOWEVER, it’s possible that some colleges and universities may, on their own, in response to the Supreme Court decision, forbid candidates from using their race so it can be said that they’re making their decisions without regard to race.
Here’s what the Supreme Court opinion stated: “Nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise."That essentially means that if students talk about their race or ethnic backgrounds in their essays or mission statements, "then the university can consider it, to the extent of the relevance," Ben-Dan said. However, "the court gave no guidance whatsoever as to how this consideration is supposed to happen."
Some negative repercussions to this decision may be:
This ruling minimizes the significant achievement of marginalized students by suggesting they’ve been given unfair advantages
The racial gap in higher education may get worse without institutions making an effort to diversify their application pool. In many states, Black students make up between 20% to 50% of public high school graduates. In those same states only 5% or 8% of freshman are Black at those same states flagship schools. 49% of Mississippi’s public school graduates in 2020 were Black and only 8% of freshman at the University of Mississippi were Black. For Latino students who make up between 20% and over 50% of public high school graduates, only 9% to 30% of freshman are Latino in those state’s flagship schools. In California, 53% of students who graduated in 2020 were Latino and only 22% of the freshman class at University of California-Berkeley were Latino.
Underrepresented students may choose not to apply to higher education in the wake of affirmative action programs being deemed unconstitutional. This decision tells students of color that their idenities and the ways in which their race impacts their experiences does not matter. It does matter. Color-blindness is not the goal of equality. Equality is contingent on being seen for and respected because of who we are as individuals, as Americans, as human beings, in a world that is tarnished by racism, chattle slavery, implicit bias and inequality. Against that background, it’s important to pay special attention to first-generation students, as well as to those who identify as Black or Latino, because they are more likely to “self-select out of going to a selective school,” said Eva Garza-Nyer, a counselor and the CEO of Texas College Advisor. “They’ll just assume ‘I have no chance.’”
Legacy Preference & Historical Disadvantages
Legacy preference means that a candidate whose family members attended the same college gets preferential treatment for their application. The history of legacy preference is explicitly racist and anti semitic. According to the ACLU, it is estimated that legacy applicants are five times as likely to be admitted to Harvard as other applicants — why is this allowed, but affirmative action is not?
Legacy admissions reinforce privilege. Harvard was founded in 1636 and was the first institution of higher education in the English colonies. In 1835, Oberlin College in Ohio became the first American college to accept Black students, men, and women. In 1869, Mary Ann Shadd Carey became the first Black woman to enroll at Howard University's Law Department.
This means that a white person today could have family legacy dating back 387 years at Harvard compared to a Black person today who could have family legacy dating back 188 years to Oberlin and no more than 154 years at Harvard. A white American could have family attending an American university for more than double the length that a Black American ever could.
Legacy preference in and of itself reduces opportunities for students from underrepresented or disadvantaged backgrounds by prioritizing applicants with family connections. This perpetuates the lack of diversity in educational institutions and may hinder efforts to create a more inclusive learning environment.
Legacy preferences can impede social mobility by making it harder for talented and motivated students from lower-income families to access top-tier institutions. This contributes to the cycle of inequality, where wealth and privilege remain concentrated among certain groups.
Let’s be clear, white teens applying to universities and colleges who have parents and grandparents that have also attended those institutions have been multiple layers of privilege and advantage over students from underrepresented and marginalized groups. Let’s name a few. First of all, that applicant is more than likely to come from a wealthier household. According to 2021 Bureau of Labor Statistics data, someone with a college degree will earn $524 more per week, $27,000 more per year, and $1 million more over a lifetime than someone with only a high school diploma or less. If one or both parents have a college degree and one or both sets of grandparents have a college degree, the family has significant opportunities to accumulate generational wealth. Having money means a lot. They might have been able to accept unpaid internships, mentorships and participated in more after-school activities because they did not have to work. Having parents in a professional industry might open doors for them to work at their family business, make connections with family friends in other industries and grain firsthand experience about their parents career path. They will also enter into higher education with knowledge from their parents on how to navigate school, what organizations to belong to, what courses to take, specific jargon and language used on campus, professors to network with, and more. Being the first in your family to attend higher education can be daunting, shocking, confusing, lonely and incredibly inimidating and white students who benefit from legacy preference do not encounter those challenges. Ultimately, white students also do not have to exist under the crushing weight of racism in a country that constantly tries to harm them.
